Letter home

KITCHENER — There were many kinds of heroes in the Second World War. Carol McKee says she’s proud that her father, Bert Field, was one of them.

Field was a wireless operator and clerk who operated his own military vehicle when he was overseas with the Canadian Army from July 1943 until January 1946, after the war had ended.

He carried a gun, but didn’t hurt anyone. He wasn’t in combat, but he did provide support for those who were. He didn’t lose a friend in the fighting, but he grieved when others did.

He had bouts of homesickness, but he made friends. He ate canned rations or enjoyed home-cooked meals in strangers’ homes. He celebrated the benefits of winter underwear, slept in foxholes as enemy shells flew overhead, bought Victory bonds with his pay, fretted when he missed a birthday at home and chafed at being hospitalized for jaundice.

He worried about what sort of job he would land when the war was over.

In short, he was an “ordinary” soldier in extraordinary times, says McKee, who recently published a book containing the wartime letters her father sent home to his mother.

From those chatty letters, says McKee, who lives in Kitchener, she learned a lot about the day-to-day life of a soldier based at the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Artillery — 4th Canadian Armoured Division.

And what she learned made her proud.

“Dad was a hero to me, not because he did anything particularly heroic in the war, but because he did his best with the jobs and responsibilities that he was given and worked hard to remain positive and keep his faith,” McKee writes in her introduction to Letters from Bert.

In 1942, Field was living with his mother, stepfather and siblings in Arkona, Ont., a village between London and Sarnia. But on Oct. 28, his birthday, he left home and signed up for the army in order “to serve Canada and to get rid of Hitler.” He trained in Listowel, Petawawa and Kingston before heading overseas for two-and-a-half years.

McKee became intrigued with her father’s perspective on the war after discovering that his mother, Lottie (Field) Marsh, had kept all 121 of his letters tucked away in a boot box.

As her family’s unofficial historian — she has published other histories — McKee decided to take on the painstaking task of typing the handwritten letters and self-publishing them in a book.

Besides being of interest to relatives and Arkona folk, the letters are a good illustration of what a young soldier was thinking, she says.

McKee thought it was unusual for an entire collection to have been saved. She was happy when the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa accepted her offer and took the original letters and some of Field’s photographs for its collection.

Her father’s expressive letters — they were written in moods that range from happy and interested to bored and apologetically grumpy — aren’t the stuff of action movies and war novels, McKee says.

“It wasn’t the sensational stuff or war strategies or the battle; just the everyday feelings and life of a soldier writing about lots of everyday topics.”

He wrote just enough about air raid alerts and “a few close ones” to suggest there was more risk than he was willing to talk about.

“I think he tried to downplay for his mother the dangers he was in,” McKee says.

McKee says her father, who was 86 when he died in 2009, didn’t talk much about the war during her childhood.

But later in life, he took part in Royal Canadian Legion parades and returned to Holland in 1995 for “Thank you, Canada” celebrations.

McKee says she was struck by the importance of letters and parcels to young men hungry for news about home. Her father appreciated receiving a “swell” pen, Laura Secord chocolates, maple syrup and Stanfield’s underwear, she says.

“That was what they seemed to live for,” she says. “If one got a parcel, they all shared.”

While overseas, Field moved with his division to sites in England, Wales, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

Along the way, his letters made note of beds (hard), the countryside (beautiful) and customs. English women who drank and smoked didn’t seem “the least bit ladylike,” one of his letters said.

His views reflected Arkona in the early 1940s, McKee explains. It was “a very ‘Protestant’ village” and the family belonged to a conservative denomination with fairly narrow views.

Field wrote home about his struggle to stay true to his Protestant beliefs, particularly after he met a young woman in London who happened to be Catholic.

“I find, after coming back from leave, that I miss the little girl I met in London very much — too much — more than I like to admit,” he wrote to his mother.

“If you could see her, you’d fall in love with her immediately, I think. She’s pretty and sweet & shy — and likes the things I like with one big exception — the one thing that keeps me from getting very serious — she is a Catholic.

“I know it was all wrong from the start, but I just couldn’t help myself. Maybe it was because I was so lonely . . .”

Field also wrote about the monotony he endured.

“Can you imagine being stuck in a little chunk of wilderness, hardly even going anywhere, or doing anything? I think I know every bush and tree and every blade of grass by heart,” he wrote in June 1944.

He also wrote about the excitement — a ride in a big “Ram” cruiser tank, a close blast from a V2 long-range German ballistic missile, and “dog fights” in the skies over the camp.

“When you go outside, the whole sky seems to be one mass of moving lights and the steady thunder blots out every other sound,” he wrote from London in February 1944.

He had questions about family members and especially regretted missing the wedding of his trailblazer sister, Ruby, who had gone to university to become a teacher.

He wrote lyrically about the scenery.

“Beyond the valley, the hills rise, tier upon tier, until they are lost in the mist that’s settling over us,” Field wrote about the Wales countryside in September 1943.

That same month, while in Wales, Field wrote that he hoped the end of the war was imminent.

“Somehow or other, I haven’t much desire to get in to action, whether cowardice on my part, or not, I don’t know,” he wrote to his mother. “More, I think that I don’t want to hurt anyone, and war certainly hurts.”

When the war did end two years later, Field returned to Arkona where he married and had four children. For 38 years he owned Field’s Department Store there. Because of his wartime experience, he could speak a little Dutch to people of Dutch heritage in the area’s farm community

McKee, 56, says she also admires her grandmother, who wrote a steady stream of letters to her soldier son. He was very special to her, she says, in part because her first husband, Bert’s father, had died while she was pregnant with him.

“I think it was very hard for her to have this son away,” McKee says. “It was hard for any mother to have a son at war.